Genus Neotoma

“There’s no life east of I-5” reads a bumper sticker that you’ll often see in the gridlock of San Diego’s coastal towns, slapped on ’60s rust buckets with board racks, six-figure Sprinters with a wetsuit superficially dangling from the side mirror, and every vehicle in between. Drive a dozen miles east on historic El Cajon Boulevard, though, and you’ll learn that the elitist-toned, tongue-in-cheek declaration is total bullshit.

Cruise past North Park’s microbreweries and craft kitchens. See the decrepit motels’ flittering neon signs? You’re getting warmer. Don’t get sidetracked by the illegal gambling dens with pai gow tables and glitchy video slots—where losers recoup losses in the back alley, and winners learn the hard way that even “America’s Finest City” has a little grit. See Pho King? You’re red-hot. Reach Goodbody Mortuary and you’ll need to flip a U—you’ve blinked and passed it.

Drive slowly, one eye looking for a small storefront, the other scanning for jaywalkers. But not too slowly—you’re on the blade. See a display window with a skeleton holding a surfboard and riding a chopped and bored ’74 Triumph Bonneville? You’ve arrived. Welcome to Pack Ratt Records & Junk.

[Pack rats] build conspicuous houses mostly of sticks, joints of cholla cacti, soil, and cattle dung, but may use a variety of debris, including wool, feathers, paper, tin cans, shed antlers, bottle caps, plastic bags, and shotgun shells. 

—American Society of Mammalogists, Mammalian Species No. 699

On a hot summer afternoon, I find proprietor Michael Whaley, better known as “Mikey Ratt,” running a slalom course in front of his shop on a skateboard with roller-skate trucks. He’s barefoot, wearing cutoff Dickies and a tie-dyed Fugs shirt. His style is low, smooth, and Bertlemann-esque as he weaves his girthy 50-year-old frame around cones and wobbling tweakers, soft urethane wheels squealing on the terrazzo as he pushes through turns. His red beard and ginger locks, still damp from a morning surf, blow in the wind. He’s the 1960s Claymation character Yukon Cornelius incarnate, spat from a fuzzy TV screen onto this dirty sidewalk.

“Hey,” Whaley says to me, “check this out!” He rolls over to an old palm tree that stands perpendicular to the entrance to the bar next door. He points to a faded spray-painted target on the trunk about waist high from the ground, traces it with his index finger like an archeologist deciphering glyphs, and explains that the bar was a Hells Angels hangout in the ’70s and ’80s called the Playhouse. “The bouncer would ram a dude’s head into the bull’s-eye when he’d kick him out,” he says while enacting a violent 86ing in slow motion. I picture a Tom & Jerry–style lump growing from his head, then his cartoon finger pushing it back down.

Whaley’s animated, endowed with Chris Farley–esque energy. He’s also a bastion of local underbelly history, all told through a gap-toothed smile and beady blue-eyed glint that can go from menacing to crossed in milliseconds.

I follow Whaley down the sidewalk to his storefront. He shows me where a stray bullet ricocheted through his display window. The shooting happened late at night, while the shop was closed. He arrived the following morning to homicide investigators waiting to get inside and collect the evidence. They told him a fed-up sex worker had chased down her pimp with a handgun, indiscriminately shooting while running past his shop. Around the corner, she executed him, stole his car, and fled to Mexico. We step over prayer-candle stains on the sidewalk, remnants of a makeshift memorial, to Pack Ratt’s entrance.

“Come on in,” Whaley says.

Fossil packrat middens are usually indurated by crystallized packrat urine, known as amberat.…Plant material saturated by amberat is protected from decay because the amberat essentially mummifies the material, like packing it in salt. 

—Justin S. Tweet, Vincent L. Santucci, and Adrian P. Hunt, “An Inventory of Packrat Middens in National Park Service Areas,” Bulletin 57, New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science

San Diego–built fish, kneeboards, and spoons spanning the decades hang from Pack Ratt Records & Junk’s ceiling, diffusing the fluorescent lighting and warming the ambiance. A rack of new and used boards dead-ends into an organized vinyl-record trough on one wall. A bar and display case separate the other wall, which is lined with Route 44 Skateboards decks, Whaley’s not-for-sale records, and a turntable that’s constantly spinning—at this moment, Purple Image’s self-titled psych-funk-rock album, a rare Map City pressing from 1970. Racks and shelves of vintage clothes, tchotchkes, and anything weird pillaged from estate sales, thrift stores, swap meets, or dumpsters fill the middle of the space.

“I grew up when thrift stores weren’t cool,” Whaley explains. “You were just a broke troll kid if you wore secondhand clothes, but I was a weird little dude and into it. My mom was obsessed with finding cool antiques and dragged me everywhere she shopped.”

A DJ who spins at San Diego’s hippest bars is digging through records. He pulls a 12-inch from a crate of ’70s Taiwanese bootlegs. Its name and title are in Mandarin characters, undecipherable to us monolinguals. Whaley plays the record for us. A beautiful minor-keyed lounge ballad fills the shop. We can feel the singer’s pain even though we don’t understand her. The song belongs on a Tarantino soundtrack. The DJ wants to buy it. But it’s love at first listen, and Whaley won’t sell. He has hoarder tendencies, and letting things go is hard—a shop-owner dichotomy. So, he cuts a deal on the DJ’s other picks and tosses in a free 7-inch for the inconvenience. They shake hands. 

Like a mounted trophy marlin, a lightly surfed Steve Lis Fish lays propped against the wall horizontally on a top shelf. The only thing wrong with it is that it’s sawed into three pieces. 

“I was cruising through Point Loma after a surf and stopped by a garage sale at this ratty-looking house,” Whaley says about the trisected board. “I asked the guy if he had any surfboards for sale, and he told me to follow him inside. Next to a La-Z-Boy is this little end table covered in beer cans and cigarette butts. The guy pushes it all onto the floor, picks up the table, and hands it to me. He’d made the end table out of that Lis Fish.” 

More surf ephemera fills the shop. Every piece has a story, and Whaley shares them all liberally. All who enter listen, rapt.

“I was blown away the first time I walked into Mikey’s shop,” says Joel Tudor. “He has cool shit, and it’s dirty. That’s why I like hanging out and selling my old boards there. Most surf shops feel like department stores. But Mikey’s in it for the right reasons. He’s not a rich ‘vintage boutique’ flipper with sage burning next to a Square credit-card reader. His prices are fair, so kids who don’t have much money can score something bitchin’.”

Whaley’s reselling ethics are strong and unwavering. He vets his clientele to ensure that the Skip Frye he found will be surfed by the person buying it and not listed online for twice the price the next day. It’s “no deal” if he sniffs anything fishy. Prices might vary according to the customer. He’s reunited surfers with stolen boards he’s found in pawn shops, often at a loss—which can hurt when profit margins are already small. No good deed goes unpunished. There have been times he’s lived in his van, a ’90s Ford E-Series Club Wagon Chateau. It’s a hand-to-mouth existence that he lives happily.

“That’s why Mikey’s rad,” says Tudor. “He’s not trying to make a ton of money. He’s selling real culture, and prices it accordingly.”

Newborn [pack rats] are called pinkies; they are hairless and blind. Their eyes open in about two weeks, and they grow a soft, velvety fur. At this stage, they are called pups or kits. At about one month old, the pups are weaned and now eat plants. By the time they are about two and a half months old, they will be on their own. 

—Idaho Fish and Game, Wildlife Express, Volume 36, Issue 6

Whaley and his older brother, Robert, moved to Mission Beach, San Diego, as young pups in the early 1980s. Their mother, Merja, a Finnish immigrant, ’60s Playboy centerfold, and recent divorcée, fell in love with Bahia Resort Hotel’s director of operations, Arthur Levey.

“He was a total class act from New York,” Whaley says about his stepfather. “He wanted to party all the time with my mom, so he moved us all into the hotel. He gave my brother and me a room on the bay so we’d leave them alone. He was a great stepdad. He gave me my sense of humor. He taught me how to treat people with respect.”

Young Whaley’s new home was two blocks from the surf and Mission Beach’s heavily trafficked boardwalk. The parenting was free-range. He went wild in the streets—a self-described “latchkey skate rat” who became a surf-obsessed miscreant.

“My brother wanted to surf,” Whaley says, “and that meant I had to surf too. I was hanging out at Hamel’s Action Sports every day. The owners, Ray and Dan Hamel, hooked me up with this T&C gutter-bottom quad—totally ’80s. It was rad, but I couldn’t ride it. I’d drop in, and the board would zing out like a bar of soap. My brother had a beautiful Gordon & Smith ‘The Magic’ model. It was around 7 foot, yellow with orange pin lines and a Rainbow fin. It worked better for me. I stole it, went to Tourmaline, lost it in the rocks, and put a big ding in it. I took it home and propped it up against the door so when my mom came in, she’d knock it over, and I could blame the ding on her. It worked.”

Punk took hold. At 14, Whaley went to see British street punks GBH (an acronym for the British legal term “grievous bodily harm”) at Iguanas, Tijuana’s short-lived, no-holds-barred rock venue. He dove from the third-story balcony into the pit, smashed his head, got knocked out, and was kicked under the stage. He woke up in the green room with the band. GBH’s singer, Colin Abrahall, said to Whaley, “You don’t look too good,” removed his patched and studded vest, draped it over the concussed teenager, and told him to keep it. Later that night, his friend’s cute older sister sweet-talked him into giving her the cut. He’s still bitter about it.

Predators of [the desert pack rat] include C. latrans [coyote], V. velox [swift fox], Buteo jamaicensis [red-tailed hawk], and Bubo virginianus [great horned owl], and possibly T. taxus [American badger]. Desert [pack rats] also consume conspecifics and other rodents caught in traps. 

—American Society of Mammalogists, Mammalian Species No. 699 

Drugs and partying took hold too.

At 17, Whaley got wasted at a Grateful Dead show at the San Diego Sports Arena. The next day, he woke up in the back of a van with a group of Deadheads in San Francisco. They kicked him out on Haight with just his skateboard. He milled around for a few days, living on the street, where a man in a trench coat walked up, asked if he was Mikey from San Diego, flashed an Uzi, and said he needed to come with him.

Whaley was escorted to a Hilton hotel penthouse, where a gang of hippies were manufacturing LSD. Production demand was high due to the upcoming Rainbow Gathering, an annual weeklong camp-out in the woods dating back to the ’60s where money is eschewed and thousands of attendees attempt to live a shared ideology of peace, harmony, freedom, and respect.

The gang told him that his friend back home, Big J., owed them money. Somehow, they’d tracked Whaley down in San Francisco and wanted him to give up Big J.’s address so they could collect. Whaley refused to narc. The gang refused to release him. An affable, consummate court jester and court holder, Whaley grew on his captors. Like Chunk and the Fratellis, they were beginning to like the kid. They even dipped Whaley’s Grateful Dead ticket stub—the only thing he had in his pockets—in acid and gave it back to him.

“I was in that hotel with them for weeks,” Whaley says. “They started getting pissed because they were spending money to feed me. Eventually, they put me to work on Haight selling weed to cover my expenses.”

Needing a surf, Whaley plotted his escape. He told the gang he’d call Big J. to set up a time and place where they could roll him. It was a lie.

“The guy who was supposed to be watching me was always flirting with chicks,” Whaley says. “While he was distracted, I told him I needed to call Big J. from a pay phone across the street. When he wasn’t looking, I took off on my skateboard and bombed those gnarly San Francisco hills all the way down to the BART station. It’s a miracle I didn’t slam or get run over by a bus. I called my mom, and she bought me a plane ticket home.”

Big J. was waiting for Whaley at the San Diego airport. He told Whaley he’d just wired the gang the money owed and quashed the beef. He handed Whaley $5,000 in cash as a thank-you for not ratting him out.

“You need to call the gang,” Big J. said. “They want you to work for them down here. You proved to them you’re not a narc and can handle yourself. Here’s their number.”

Whaley accepted the offer. While working in Hamel’s rental booth on the Mission Beach boardwalk, he sold the gang’s acid. Business was good until he got busted. 

“The cops told me they’d arrest me if they saw me on the beach again,” Whaley says. “That was my warning—my get-out-of-jail-free card. I went to Portland for a month while the heat cooled. But nothing could keep me away from San Diego.”

[Desert pack rats] feed on a diet of creosote, Larrea tridentata. This plant is packed with bitter chemicals whose tastes hint at their toxic nature. Ingestion of these poisons can lead to kidney cysts and cancer. Despite such dire consequences, woodrats  [also known as pack rats] ingest enough of these plant toxins to kill a lab rat. Every day. 

—Anne Madden, “Bacteria allow woodrats to eat poison,” The Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology

Through his early twenties, Whaley had boards stashed in bushes at the reefs and beachbreaks around San Diego. He slept on alley couches and lived in squats and parks while bouncing between Ocean Beach and Pacific Beach—partying too much. Any drug on the table, he just said yes. Heroin stole his soul.

“I was curled up in front of Hamel’s, strung out and barefoot,” Whaley says. “I’d sold my skateboard to buy dope. Charlie Vurmin, the gnarliest skateboarder and punker I knew, skated up to me and said, ‘What’s wrong with you, dude? You’re fucking nothing without a skateboard,’ and left in disgust. I was so embarrassed. I started getting dope sick. Later, Vurmin skated back up to me and said, ‘Show up to my house, and I’ll have food, shoes, and a skateboard waiting for you.’”

Whaley walked barefoot 5 miles to Vurmin’s home and accepted the help.

“That’s when I realized I needed to quit hard drugs,” Whaley says. “The nail in the coffin was when my daughter, Inde, was born. I was 25, and that was it. She saved my life. She’s in her twenties now and is the coolest person ever.”

Packrats build their middens wherever nature can give them a headstart: in the center of yucca clumps or cholla patches, under fallen Joshua tree trunks, or in rock shelters or caves. 

—Chris Clarke, “Woodrats: How the Desert’s Smallest Librarians Contributed to Scientific Discovery,” PBS

Whaley and I walk toward the back of his shop. He stops at the turntable and drops the needle on On the Streets of New York by Moondog—a composer blinded as a child by accidentally detonating a dynamite cap he found in a field, who spent his life playing homemade instruments while roaming 6th Avenue dressed as a Viking. The music is a fitting coda to the stories Whaley’s shared.

We part a beaded curtain to a hallway lined floor to ceiling with vintage skateboards, paipos, and old surf mats. At the doorway to the shaping bay, he unlatches a velvet rope and we step inside.

“This is the most important part of the shop,” Whaley says. “My dear friend Mike Griffin, a longtime underground San Diego shaper and PB Point surfer, lost his shaping bay and was going to quit making boards. He was bummed about the whole situation, which freaked me out because he’s the most positive, kind, and sweet person I know. I told him, ‘Fuck that! You’re not quitting shaping.’ Shaper Scott Jones and I ripped out my office and turned it into a pristine new shaping and glassing room for Mike.”

Griffin shaped many trad fish in the room—even a Pipeline board for Tudor. His label was Scenic Surfboards, but he’d leave most of his boards logo-less as a practice in humility. Griffin, a transcendental meditator and frequenter of the Self-Realization Center near Swami’s, brought a Zen-like presence to the shop and Whaley’s life. Sadly, Griffin died of cancer in 2022 at the age of 62.

“Mike would leave the door cracked 2 inches,” Whaley says. “I’d watch him shape. His movements were like tai chi. Even the sound of his sanding block on the foam was peaceful. He made me a better human. He’d tell me not to get hung up on localism, being a dick, yelling at people, and all that bullshit. He’d say, ‘What’s getting angry doing for you, man? Life’s life.’”

In honor of Griffin, whose templates and tools are still inside, Pack Ratt’s shaping room is open for anyone to use. It’s where Whaley shapes his own crafts, mostly kneeboards and Greenough-inspired flex spoons.

The shaping room is also Whaley’s de facto art studio. He’ll fire resin sculptures inspired by the midcentury modern Finish Fetish movement. He’ll blast boards with psychedelic air sprays using 12-inch and 7-inch records, CDs, and album sleeves as stencils. His style is a simplified homage to Rainbow Surfboards’ late-’60s artwork by Star Shields, John Breeden, and Peter St. Pierre. He’ll lightly dust a blank with Rust-Oleum spray paint, a taboo that can hinder proper lamination. Board painter Paul Runyan taught him to blast the blank with compressed air after each pass to clear paint-clogged polyurethane pores. The hack works. None of the boards he’s painted have delaminated.

A couple of years ago, Whaley accidentally asphyxiated himself after a long day of painting and glassing without a mask. His friend found him passed out and took him to the hospital. Not one for regular checkups, Whaley feared the worst concerning his health. He thought his years in the gutter had surely planted something malignant inside of him. But the doctor gave him a clean bill—said he was “healthy as a horse”—and told him to wear a respirator when working with toxic chemicals. 

He felt reborn.

When [pack rats] come across a new treasure, they’ll drop whatever they’re carrying in order to pick up the new item, effectively trading one token for the other. 

—National Wildlife Federation

Around that time, Whaley’s relationship with surfing was hitting a wall. “The thing I love doing the most was making me so eggy,” Whaley says. “I would leave the water pissed after surfing with barneys who’d run me over. Surfing started to feel like a waste of time.”

An airbag saved it. Griffin had loaned him an old 4th Gear Flyer inflatable surf mat from the ’80s and told him he needed to master it.

“Matting was like being a grom again,” Whaley says, “taking off, going over the falls, laughing your ass off. I sucked at first but was having a killer time with my friends in the Ocean Beach swim zone, away from kooks. When it clicked, it was the most amazing feeling I’d ever experienced on a wave. When you feel every pontoon light up, you start gliding with no noise underneath you. You’re flying with your face only a few inches from the water, watching every energy line flow up the wave while chasing down the lip, hauling ass until you kick out or get eaten up. The experience is out of this world.”

Whaley reached out to Paul Gross, who’s made 4th Gear Flyer mats by hand since 1984, for an interview for his zine, Lower Powered. Gross obliged. He thought Whaley was funny and donated a 4th Gear Flyer for a raffle at the Meeting of the Mats—a Halloween jam session Whaley was organizing where mat riders surf in costume. (It’s since become an annual event. Many attend dressed up as Whaley.) Whaley became a missionary for the mat, preaching its joys and helping surfers find their “lower power.” Gross was getting orders from customers saying, “Mikey sent me.” Gross noticed and sent Whaley a stack of mats to sell in his shop. They sold out. Gross sent more. Artist Nick Simich made a sign for Pack Ratt Records that read, “4th Gear Flyer: Authorized Dealer.” Whaley texted a photo of it to Gross, who texted back, “Your sign’s wrong. It should say, ‘World’s Only Authorized Dealer.’”

The formal study of fossil packrat middens began in the 1960s. Since that time, middens have become one of the primary paleoecological proxies for the late Pleistocene and Holocene in much of the American West, recognized as excellent sources of plant macrofossils, pollen, arthropod and vertebrate body fossils, and rodent coprolites. 

—Justin S. Tweet, Vincent L. Santucci, and Adrian P. Hunt, “An Inventory of Packrat Middens in National Park Service Areas,” Bulletin 57, New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science

Whaley and I clear the shaping room so a young woman can try on a pair of vintage corduroy OP shorts. Yes, the shaping room is also Pack Ratt’s dressing room.

Another shopper wants a price check on a chrome skull with bulging gelatinous eyeballs implanted into its sockets by Whaley. He tells him it’s not for sale. A mid-twentysomething is rifling through a box of ’70s surfboard fins.

“If you can’t find the fin you’re looking for, we can just make one,” Whaley says to him. The guy looks spun by the offer.

There’s a party of three interested in 4th Gear Flyers. Whaley begins sermonizing about how matting will change their lives. He unfurls one like a mad scientist sharing a schematic and, in a prop-comedy-esque routine, performs how to inflate and ride it. It crescendoes with him rolling on the floor, bear-hugging the mat while simulating getting pounded by a set wave. Everyone in the shop watches and laughs. He makes multiple sales, including me.

“Pack Ratt Records and Junk is a reflection of my entire life,” Whaley tells me after closing for the day. “It’s inspired by every weird store I stepped into growing up, all the music I listen to, all the shit that my friends and I are into. It’s a hangout. A place to meet weird people, see weird shit, and let people be themselves and not get vibed out by some cool-guy surfer. It’s a place for my talented friends to sell the bitchin’ shit they make. It’s an open door for every type of human. If you’re cool, come hang out and be silly. That’s what it’s about.”

The majority of pack rat populations in structures can be controlled by using traps. Woodrats [pack rats] show little fear of new objects in their environment. The standard rat snap trap is quite effective.…Appropriate baits include nuts, meats, bacon, oatmeal, prunes, raisins, and other dried fruit. 

—Truly Nolen Pest Control

As the sun sinks, I drive west down El Cajon Boulevard for an evening session. A new surf mat, a Pack Ratt tee, and a few records ride shotgun. Whaley’s wild yarns echo in my head, soundtracked by his music recommendations playing on my car stereo. To me, all feel like what an archeologist would deem “significant discoveries” excavated from Pack Ratt’s midden.

Impulsively, I stop at a donut shop—many are open 24 hours in this part of town. I bite into an un-gentrified, anti-“craft,” 75-cent chocolate rainbow sprinkle. It’s crunchy on the outside and soft on the inside. Dale Velzy’s nascent surf-retail ethos comes to mind as I chew.

“Very loose,” the Hawk explained in Pacific Vibrations when asked how he ran his shop. “A dollar was a dollar and a wave was a wave. I enjoyed myself.”

In our modern era, good luck finding that west of I-5, where a different species, Rattus norvegicus, infests and races. It’s out there among the mischiefs moving at full sprint. You just need to slow down to find it.